Forward Deployed Engineer, Physical AI

About the company
Our client is an early-stage, well-funded AI company building an AI engineer for the physical world. It works alongside human engineers at large industrial manufacturers and uses the same complex engineering tools they do. It runs inside each customer's own cloud environment, including restricted and locked-down networks.
The role
You will be the technical lead for customer deployments in Australia. You'll make the key calls on architecture, data integrations and user experience. Customers run messy, multi-cloud IT environments with strong security requirements, so every deployment is a real engineering problem.
You'll spend around 40% of your time on site with a customer in Perth. The rest you'll work remotely with a small, hands-on global team.
What you'll do

• Lead customer deployments end to end, from scoping their environment through to go live.
• Build end-to-end AI solutions and integrate the agent into the engineering tools, data sources and IT systems customers already use.
• Work through multi-cloud and restricted network environments with strong security and networking safeguards.
• Shape how the agent fits real engineering workflows, and feed what you learn back to the product and research teams.
• Use AI coding agents heavily to build and ship quickly.

What you'll bring

• 3+ years as a forward deployed engineer or AI engineer, ideally at a physical AI startup or an industrial company.
• Strong Python.
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs and agentic AI.
• Enterprise systems integration experience in complex customer environments.
• Experience of both large-scale enterprise systems and startup pace.
• Confidence leading technical conversations with a customer's engineers.
• Australian Citizen or Permanent Resident, based in Perth.

Nice to have

• Exposure to post-training (SFT, RLVR).
• A mechanical or electrical engineering background, or real curiosity about it.
• Experience in mining, resources, aerospace or manufacturing.
• Experience deploying into secure or air-gapped environments.

Why join

• A$200K to A$275K.
• An early seat at a well-funded company working on one of the harder problems in applied AI.
• Real ownership: you make the architecture calls on deployments.
• Hands-on work on real physical engineering problems.
• A team that values output over hours. Short crunches happen, but long hours aren't the culture.

Interested?
Apply now, or reach out to Iain Blackburn at Lumiq Talent (iain@lumiqtalent.com) for a confidential chat.